The Ecological Foundation & Embeddedness of Human Systems
To fully grasp the ecologically-embedded dimension of human freedom, we must first realize that our human systems (societal, economic and institutional) are themselves embedded in the biosphere, not above it. Far from a romantic view of nature, this stems from ecological realism – the understanding that humanity is part of, not separate from, its environment. Indeed, our societal structures have maintained a close relationship with the natural world throughout human history and civilization. Acknowledging the ecological foundation and embeddedness of our human systems must therefore be our starting point. It can be made explicit in three main ways.
The Life-Sustaining Function of Ecosystem Services
First off, our societies rely on the environment at the most fundamental level to provide for and sustain life on Earth. The biodiversity-powered ecosystems that humanity so readily destroys or converts in fact provide crucial contributions to human societies called ecosystem services.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment divided these services into four categories: provisioning services provide direct, tangible products from ecosystems such as food (crops, fish…), fresh water, raw materials (wood, fiber…), or genetic/medicinal resources. Regulating services (climate regulation, air and water purification, flood and erosion control, soil fertility, pollination, pest regulation) stabilize the environment in ways that are crucial for life and societal infrastructures. Supporting services include primary production (photosynthesis) as well as nutrient cycling and soil formation which are largely upheld and enhanced by biodiversity. Together, these contributions from nature provide the very foundation for all life on the planet, including no less than food and water. Yet while provisioning services might be more readily acknowledged, many of the regulating and supporting ones operate in the background, virtually invisible to the uninformed eye. In neoliberal economics, regulating services are in fact treated as an externality; in other words, the consequence of the economic activity on these contributions is mostly disregarded. Over time, their impairment will nonetheless be profoundly felt. Supporting services, for their part, are absolutely critical in that they make all other services possible. They are vital for the continuity of ecosystem functioning and, in this sense, truly represent the unseen platform for life on Earth. Unfortunately, they do not directly enter or impact markets or even daily human experience, hence they go unnoticed and unappreciated in modern market-minded societies. If these elemental, background processes were to falter, the provisioning and regulating services on which societies depend would collapse. Clearly, they quietly keep the biosphere stable and productive, which in turn keeps human civilization going.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment also identified cultural services, the non-material benefits people gain from ecosystems including knowledge, recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, cultural identity, spiritual fulfillment, and mental health. While these might seem less tangible and are often undervalued or ignored altogether in economic theories, they are essential nonetheless to human well-being and, therefore, to a cohesive society.
Economies Are Built on Forests, Soils, Rivers & Mines
Second come our economies. Modern economies do not exist in isolation, decoupled from the environment. They are built on a material basis provided by nature – the vast array of resources, provisioning services, and energy flows that underpin all production and consumption. The global economy can be viewed as a vast throughput machine, continuously extracting and converting raw natural assets (minerals, timber, crops, fresh water, fuel, sand…) into commodities, buildings and products, and ultimately into heat, waste and pollution. The biosphere therefore serves as both a source and a sink of economic activity: it supplies raw materials and absorbs (or at least receives) the waste by-products of the economy as well as much of what is discarded at the end of products’ service lives. How reliant is the global economy on the environment? The 2011 Changing Wealth of Nations report from the World Bank highlights that about a third of low-income countries’ economies is deeply and directly dependent on nature’s provision and services. Likewise, The New Nature Economy Report from the World Economic Forum in 2020 reveals that over half of the world’s total GDP is moderately to highly dependent on the environment. Those reports address the extractive part of the economy, yet even the service economy – seemingly so far from nature – relies on it for its energy-heavy demands (powered by the environment), its technological needs (rare earths, minerals, data centers requiring water and cooling), global transport, infrastructure… and yes, human capital. That is without mentioning that services rest on the first two layers of the economic structure – primary (extractive) and secondary (manufacturing). Without extraction and manufacturing, what services can an economy offer? Therefore, it may seem that the economy is all about bytes, stocks and finance, but its foundation is forests, soils, rivers, and mines.
Economic theory has historically treated nature as mostly external – an infinite source and sink – although there are now branches such as ecological economics that overturn this assumption. In reality, the economy is situated within a larger environment: the biosphere, or ecological system. Far from transcending it, the economy is in fact deeply reliant on this biosphere, so much so that no economic activity without nature’s provisioning or resources could happen. As the economy expands, it is increasingly pressing against the limits of its parent system and, in so doing, crosses planetary boundaries (six boundaries breached out of nine as of today, as per Rockström’s model). Today, the world’s economy has grown so large, it now has the power to destabilize the very platform it was built upon. With no end in sight to the pursuit of endless growth, the capitalist economy is blatantly setting the stage for its own undoing.
The Ecological Embeddedness of Human Systems – by Freedom for
Shedding Light on the Reciprocal Interaction Between Humanity and Its Environmental Foundation
The Complex Environment–Governance Nexus
Third is the relationship between the environment and the institutional realm. In this context, environment is understood broadly as the whole context in which societies operate and develop. This interplay is really multifaceted as it is mediated by human agency as well as local history and culture. Yet without oversimplifying or smoothing out complex dynamics, certain common patterns can emerge.
To begin with, environmental conditions – geography, climate, natural resources and ecosystem services – set fundamental constraints, needs and opportunities within which institutions emerge and governance is shaped. The more rich and stable the environmental basis of a nation, the more stable and resilient its society can be, the more enduring its institutional structure can become. Indeed, where nature reliably provides food, water, energy and livelihoods, states have an easier time building capacity, an economic base, and stability. This, in turn, gives them a platform to ensure durability; it also makes governance more predictable – potentially, though not necessarily, proactive or even farsighted. Of note: we’re not covering man-made dynamics here – such as the resource curse, systemic corruption, political infighting, etc. – that could result in poor or failed governance but are not environmentally-informed dynamics per se. What is more, there is a caveat: durability and stability do not, in themselves, entail good governance or individual freedom. From Ancient Egypt and Imperial China to the Ottoman Empire, Absolutist France under Louis XIV, and Tsarist Russia, history is replete with regimes that were endowed with abundant resources, achieved lasting stability and durability, yet remained tightly governed – offering little in the way of freedom. This seems to be a recurring pattern in human history.
Conversely, environmental volatility or decline erodes predictability and the state’s adaptive capacity. It poses chronic hardships (drought, floods, pandemics, resource scarcity…), forcing governments to face recurrent stress tests and to adapt accordingly to offset systemic instability. If the state struggles to keep up with nature, governance may become increasingly reactive; if the state is in fact overwhelmed, governance might deliver poor outcomes and even lack coherence, consistency, or vision. Of course, there are many possible trajectories here, depending (among other things) on the severity and frequency of the hardships, the societal makeup as well as the institutional strength, legitimacy and response at each juncture. What is essential, however, is that while environmental conditions do not rigidly dictate institutional design, governance and political outcomes, they do inform and constrain these realms. In particular, where nature provides sparsely or maintains relentless pressure on society, the emphasis on necessity is likely to define governance to a (much) greater extent as opportunities shrink and fundamental needs rise, setting priorities accordingly. This arguably leaves less leeway for ideology- or values-based governance – something that generous resource provisions could possibly allow. In other words, environmental decline or instability contracts the governance space – the set of viable institutional options a government can choose from. While a stable environment is a potential platform for governance capacity and durability, a declining environment – and the subsequent loss of stability – constrains and pressures governance towards more regimented and restrictive forms in an effort to preserve order and stability.
It transpires that for states, wealth, power and stability can be measured in terms of access to natural resources, a major focus of governance. In this regard, environmental assets are not merely considered valuable commodities, they are in fact strategic capital that underpins state power and durability. This has historically led countries and empires to seek access to resources beyond their original borders through either commerce or conquest. In today’s world, outright invasion is rare (although some argue that resource wars still very much exist or are, at least, latent) yet the incentive to shore up a country’s internal stability through strategic control of key resources, including influence over critical chokepoints, has become greater than ever. Such clout directly translates into geopolitical leverage and can project a state’s power onto the world while asserting authority over competitors. This enables powerful countries to secure steady flows and a greater diversity of those vital resources on favorable terms. It also boosts their economies, feeding back into internal stability, while cushioning them against external or geopolitical pressures. Therefore, nature has invited itself squarely into geopolitics, which has a lot to do with the impulse to secure state stability and authority through access to land, freshwater, minerals, and energy – the fundamental inputs for national security and industrial power. As a result, the environment has, in essence, become geopolitical currency. Those who have it or control access to it establish influence and gain the power to sway the international order; those who lack it seek arrangements and alignments to obtain it, and they may not get the better end of the deal.
The environment–governance nexus doesn’t stop here. Political ideologies, deeply intertwined with and shaped by economic paradigms, have profound effects on how societies relate to the natural world. Neoliberalism – the latest version of capitalism and the globally dominant economic paradigm – sees nature as capital. Natural assets are to be converted into commodities and inputs for production to spur economic growth and capital generation. This has led to ever-expanding extraction of natural resources and production of waste. In this approach, the environment is assigned monetary value only insofar as it can be exploited for profit. What can’t be priced (say, priceless ecosystem services) is usually ignored as an externality, effectively offloading environmental costs onto society. What is more, to function unimpeded, capitalism pushes for deregulation and the weakening of traditional environmental protections, enabling better pursuit of profit yet often ignoring the depletion of natural capital in the process. It comes as no surprise, then, that the ideological commitment to growth yielded an explosion of the human ecological footprint to the point where nature can no longer supply what the economy demands, at the pace at which it demands it: a phenomenon known as ecological overshoot. Consequently, on a finite planet, the political realm does loop back into the environment; it can, as is the case when misguided by the capitalist paradigm, undermine and impair the ecological basis upon which governance is carried out. This is just a matter of time.
The Ecological Embeddedness of Human Freedom
Human systems are therefore reliant on the environment which, for better or worse, they impact in return. Indeed, most societal activities, collective or individual, interact with the biosphere and affect it in some way. What – and how – we produce and consume, our lifestyle choices, our unrestrained passion for technology… all draw from ecological inputs (energy, materials) and feed back into the ecological system (waste, emissions, land use, mining pollution…). Likewise, our economic paradigm and competition for resources in pursuit of stability and geopolitical power reshape the natural world. This is what true embeddedness means: a reciprocal relationship. It should be noted, however, that humanity is not bound to affect its environment in detrimental ways. Good governance can also shape environmental stability (soil conservation, ecosystem conservation, climate adaptation, deforestation policies…). As a matter of fact, if we are to preserve human civilization from eventual ruin, we will have to become wise stewards of the planet and its resources.
When it comes to ecological embeddedness, there is an important caveat worth touching upon as it might creep into our minds: our technological advancement has not freed us from or elevated us above the constraints of nature, nor will it ever. If anything, it has entrenched our dependency by enabling us to build ever more tech-dependent societies or, in other words, ever more metal-dependent societies. It has also made it possible for us to consume a greater variety and volume of resources than ever before while degrading the planet faster than ever before. Rather than saving the day, technology is enabling us to reach – and transgress, if not shatter – planetary boundaries more dramatically, undermining our ecological foundation at a spectacular pace. Technology will have a role to play in tackling the challenges ahead, but it is not a panacea or a magic bullet. It is always going to draw from the environment and must therefore be used wisely and sparingly.
Once our intrinsic, dynamic, and reciprocal relationship with nature is firmly acknowledged, it logically follows that if we spoil our supportive ecological basis, some kind of feedback and repercussions will ensue – economic crises, political crises, systemic instability, and the forceful attempt to keep society afloat to ensure the continuity of the human civilization. It would then be unreasonable to assume that a society under strain would leave the freedom of its constituents fully unscathed. Without being deterministic, we must come to terms with the fact that our human systems remain integrated into, influenced, and ultimately bounded by the structure and dynamics of the overarching system they belong to: the biosphere. Quite bluntly, this means that if our environmental foundation deteriorates too much, the freedom space will begin to contract. It seems appropriate, then, to talk about the ecological embeddedness of human freedom.